Various computer applications are used to create graphics, applications, animations, videos, and other electronic content. Many applications provide a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) interface that allows the appearance of the content being created to be specified on a graphical canvas area. However created, electronic content can involve displaying, animating, or otherwise playing various types of visually-perceptible objects. Geometric shapes, images, pictures, and text are examples of such objects. How such objects are positioned and used in the electronic content can vary and may depend upon the particular type of electronic content.
On web pages, rich Internet applications, and various other types of electronic content, the position of objects is often defined in a creation application with reference to an aspect of the electronic content. For example, an object's position may be defined with respect to distance from one or more of the edges of the electronic content's display area. While defining positioning with respect to content edges is useful, it is also often desirable to create and use more complicated object layouts. Content creators, e.g., designers, developers, and other persons, for example, often find it useful to define object positioning with respect to a reference point common to objects in the group. For example, all of the individual objects that make up a button may be defined as parts of a single group. The position of each object can be defined relative to a common origin, such as an upper left most point of a common group bounds. Thus, in a content creation environment, the content creator can move the entire group, e.g., all parts of a button, simply by making an edit that repositions the origin. In one example, a button component is implemented as a parent component and the individual objects that make up the button are defined as child components such that their position is defined relative to an origin or bounds associated with the parent button component.
An “effect” is a change from one state to another in multi-state content. Content creators can define or otherwise create an effect in various ways in various content creation environments. In some environments, an effect is defined based on a reference to a transform point. The term “transform point” is used to refer to any reference point used for determining one or more changes across two or more states in multi-state content. A transform point can provide a useful reference for effects in which one or more objects is moved, rotated, resized, or otherwise edited where such editing is defined relative to that common point. For example, a group of two objects may have a first orientation in a first state and may be rotated about a particular transform point to have a second orientation in a second state. Rotation of both of the objects in the group is based on that single transform point such that the group of objects is rotated about that point as whole. A content creation application may display information about these rotations, for example, by listing a rotation effect in a chart or other listing of effects applied to the objects or the associated group. Such information allows a content creator to easily understand and edit the individual effects specified to occur between different states of the multi-state content that is being created.
Existing content creation applications, such as Flash® Catalyst® 1.0 available from Adobe Systems Incorporated of San Jose, Calif., provide various features that identify, for content creators, the effects that are defined between states of content being created. However, content creators are often also presented with additional (helper) effects that the content creators do not expect to see. Various user edits can affect the position of the origin and thus require definitional adjustments that are not descriptive of the intended change between state but that are instead descriptive of an adjustment required. As an example, moving an object that is a member of a group may result in the generation of move effects for other objects that are also members of the same group even though such other objects were not moved. In this example, such helper effects may be generated because moving the object might require normalizing the group. The terms normalizing and normalization refer to changing a position of an origin and updating objects that reference the origin to account for that change. In the present example, offsetting the origin requires adjustments to the x/y values defining the positioning of the other objects so that those objects will maintain their same global positions. Displaying these helper effects, for example, in an effects list, may be confusing to a content creator. Moreover, allowing a content creator to modify these helper effects can result in unexpected behavior.